Everyman's Library

Everyman's Library began in London in 1906, when the publisher J. M. Dent launched a series of well-made, low-priced reprints meant for every kind of reader. Ernest Rhys was its first editor and found the name in the medieval play Everyman, where the figure of Knowledge offers to guide the hero on his journey. Those lines still appear in each volume. The first title was Boswell's Life of Johnson. Five hundred volumes were out by the end of 1910, the thousandth (Aristotle's Metaphysics) arrived in 1956, and by 1975 the list ran to 994 titles in 1,239 volumes.

New titles stopped in the 1970s. In 1991 David Campbell, heading a small new firm, took the hardback rights and relaunched the series with the backing of Random House in Britain and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The first 22 titles that September included Pride and Prejudice and Huckleberry Finn. Control passed to Random House in 2002, and the books are now carried by Knopf Doubleday and Penguin UK, both part of Penguin Random House.

The list is hardback classics, old and recent. The Contemporary Classics line gathers twentieth-century fiction and nonfiction, among them Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Nabokov's Ada and Joan Didion's I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking. Pocket Poets are small cloth volumes of single poets such as Auden, Dickinson, Frost and Langston Hughes, plus themed anthologies; Pocket Classics does the same for prose. In 2000 the house also began a collected edition of P. G. Wodehouse.

Borges arrived in the 1993 Everyman edition of Ficciones, in Anthony Kerrigan's translation with an introduction by John Sturrock. That format is typical. Expect an introduction by a scholar or fellow writer, a select bibliography and a chronology of the author's life, printed on acid-free cream paper with a sewn binding and a silk ribbon marker. These are books built to be kept and reread.